This invention relates generally to electronic systems, and more particularly to the management of electronic systems.
An electronic system may include, but is not limited to computer hardware, software, telecommunications equipment, and any other kind of electronic device. During electronic system operation, a system administrator (which may be a human or an electronic device) may receive information, for example alerts/events, simultaneously from various parts of the electronic system. Some information may be strictly informative, while other information may require action on the part of the system administrator. The system administrator may have to prioritize activities, depending upon the nature of the received information. Prior art filtering systems allow the system administrator to apply simple or complex filters to the information, one at a time, in order to sort the information and thus assist the system administrator in prioritizing activity that might be based on the received information which may be alerts, events, or any other type of information. A user may currently create a filter that views different sets of alerts, for example, but to monitor all of the different conditions simultaneously requires a discrete filter to be created for every type of condition. Effective filtering systems require large libraries of filters to cover all cases, as typically electronic alert and event messages contain dozens of filterable attributes. Further, the system administrator or any other user might be constrained by finite display size when visually reviewing the results of filtering, which might be displayed in, for example, tabular or graphical form, for each filter.
More sophisticated methods of summarizing, correlating and visualizing information from potentially hundreds of thousands of managed electronic elements are needed by electronic system infrastructure providers, who are striving to manage increasingly more and more complex electronic systems with less manpower than in previous years. Prior methods require either end-users to create and manage potentially thousands of individual and discrete electronic system information filters, or manually correlate potentially thousands of electronic system alert messages, in order to make decisions on when and where human intervention is required to service elements of the electronic system.